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Cesaire, Aime. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. Trans. and ed. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
Aime Cesaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in book form in 1947, marked the beginning of his quest for-and subsequent defining ofnegritude, the concept of Black consciousness he founded with Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas. This translation, a revision of Eshleman and Smith's 1983 translation for their edition of Cesaire's collected poems, offers a fresh and vibrant version of this landmark long poem.
Although Cesaire was profoundly influenced by surrealism, the structure and content of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land are both concrete and comprehensible. Instead of using the flashier methods of surrealism, Cesaire's...